Posted
by
Soulskill
on Monday May 03, 2010 @04:53PM
from the exxon-who dept.

Dasher42 writes "Claims are circulating on the Internet that the Coast Guard fears the Deepwater Horizon well has sprung two extra leaks, raising fears that all control over the release of oil at the site will be lost. The oil field, one of the largest ever discovered, could release 50,000 barrels a day into the ocean, with implications for marine life around the globe that are difficult to comprehend. So, considering that losing our oceanic life, with subsequent unraveling of our land-based ecosystems, is a far more possible apocalyptic scenario than a killer asteroid — what do we do about it?" Other readers have sent some interesting pictures of the spill. One set shows the Deepwater Horizon rig as it collapsed into the ocean. Others, from NASA, indicate that the spill's surface area now rivals that of Florida. The US government has indicated that it intends to require BP to foot the bill for the cleanup. And the Governator has just withdrawn support for drilling off the California coast.

Except they can't pass that cost on to the consumer, because they're still competing in a highly fungible market. Exxon isn't having this problem, Shell isn't having this problem - it's just BP. Which means that if BP raises its prices, people will buy gas from companies that don't have to deal with a multi-billion dollar clean-up.

And if past Oil disasters are any indication, there are probably fines coming along as well. Along with bills related to government operations that had to deal with the spill.

Oh I agree, and furthermore, if this accident turns out to be as bad as the worst case, then I'd predict that this is probably the end of BP the company. They're probably looking at bankruptcy, and then being broken up into assets that are purchased by their competitors. In the worst case.

Ultimately, BP is responsible for this as they leased the rig and hired the subcontractors. I'm not going to demonize BP. Right now, the cause is all a matter of speculation until they can get the well capped and do a proper investigation. Accidents happen (and yes, I live in a gulf state not too far from the coast), and the truth is, no one is giving up fossil fuels anytime soon, because there simply isn't a really practical replacement right now. Supplements, yes. Replacements... not so much. I recently read that there are over 1400 wells in the gulf, and none of them have ever had an accident like this. We should probably wait to see what actually happened and why before we decide who to line up against the wall.

Oh please, you act like we have a choice in whether or not plastic is in our lives. There is simply no choice with the way our economy is set up. Frankly, I do not demand petroleum products, but companies choose to wrap wrap their food or other products in it. I would be perfectly happy if it were covered in something else.

Besides, plastic and polymers does NOT imply petroleum like you insinuate. It is perhaps easier to produce plastics by breaking down long hydrocarbon chains, but it is also possible to build them (or equivalent plastics) up from monomers not derived from petroleum.

And how is calling and pushing for a shift to alternative fuels (algae, solar, wind) being complicit in petroleum use? Unfortunately this has been against a headwind of conservatives yelling "Drill, Baby Drill." Hopefully now everyone can see the huge environmental and economic problems that this drilling actually produces. There will always be people decrying any fuel source for some reason, but I think it should be obvious now that any disaster from a wind farm or solar power plant pales in comparison to an offshore oil disaster.

Oh please, you act like we have a choice in whether or not plastic is in our lives. There is simply no choice with the way our economy is set up. Frankly, I do not demand petroleum products, but companies choose to wrap wrap their food or other products in it. I would be perfectly happy if it were covered in something else....Unfortunately this has been against a headwind of conservatives yelling "Drill, Baby Drill."

So let me get this straight. First you bitch because you can't live without petroleum products, and then you bitch about people who want to bring them to you?

I got news for you bub, conservatives can't live without them either. The difference we know that unicorn farts make for a crappy petroleum substitute. We know that it's stupid to artificially produce scarcity and increase the price on a product that you just admitted you can't live without.

Here, let me explain something to you from a conservative standpoint:1) We know that America runs on energy. Energy comes from many sources, including oil2) We know that America has a lot of energy reserves that we are not tapping including, but not limited to: oil, natural gas, nuclear, solar, wind, hydro, tidal, and geo.3) We don't care where the energy comes from. Unfortunately, we simply use more energy than all the "green" energy that we can possibly produce (wind) or that we are allowed to produce (nuclear).4) Since we are not tapping the resources listed in #2, we have to buy them from bad people who want to kill us.

So, the solution is simple:1) Drill baby drill.2) Use the resources (money) we gain from domestic energy production and invest that money into renewables (ethanol from a variety of sources) and alternatives (electric cars)3) By the time we run out of domestic energy, we should have a viable replacement installed. If not, we're all F@%KED anyway because the whole world will be out of easy to access energy.

Still, we can't drill our way out of the this crisis. We can't conserve our way out of this crisis. We can't utilize unicorn farts to get us out of this crisis. It will take a mix of all three. So that means:1) Liberals, STFU and let us get at the energy we have.2) Conservatives, STFU and accept the fact that some energy profits will be taxed to pave the way for renewables.3) ???4) Profit!!!

I don't think anyone can say they don't depend on oil for something in their life. Sure, there might be someone living in the mountains of Utah or something, but be realistic, we all need oil for something. I'll put my dependencies up against most anyone and bet I win. To say that our hands are just as dirty as BP though is a bit retarded.

I'll take my share of the blame for demand, but as far as taking blame for the means, that's another story. It's not my fault if they opted to use the lowest bidder to increase profit margins. It's not my fault they decided to go way off-shore, into an unsafe location, rather than somewhere in the sand. It's not my fault that they had inefficient safety controls and it's not my fault that there are inadequate response measures in place.

By your logic, we're also at fault for every vehicle recall that happens because the robot used by some manufacturer didn't tighten a bolt properly, all because we want a car. Just because I want something, doesn't mean I'm the cause for a breakdown in the process.

- if you use any electronics, or wear shoes for that matter, you're partially responsible for the sweatshops in China. (I notice you didn't ask if he bought specifically from BP, so I'm not gonna cut you any such slack here either.)

- if you ever used anything cocoa-based, you're partially responsible for child slave labour in Africa. (Turns out even buying "Fair Trade" doesn't mean it can't be from those.)

- if you or any relative ever used opiates (e.g., as painkillers for a cancer), then you're at least partially responsible for funding the taliban in Afghanistan. (There is no opium poppy grown in the USA to the best of my knowledge, you know.)

- if you ever bought bread, whiskey, beer or anything made from grain, really, then you're at least partially responsible for the destruction of agriculture in third world countries and the extinction of several species because of pesticides.

Etc.

I could call you a monster for that, but in reality, it just shows how stupid that kind of argument is.

I know it's hard for you right-wing, corporate- and oil-baron-apologist crowd to comprehend, but really it isn't everyone else who's a hypocrite. It's just your limited brain power, sorry. The rest of us can distinguish between personal guilt and just not having other choices but trying to change society for the better in those aspects. But, don't worry if you can't understand it right away. Some day your children might evolve into something that does. And maybe can walk without getting bruised knuckles. Won't that be nice?

Or in other words, that's gotta be the lamest attempt at a guilt trip attempt ever.

It makes no sense that riding a bike 3 miles and owning a hummer stuck in traffic 30 minutes every day are anywhere near each other in oil consumption. And even the H3 owners have less responsibility than the rig owners and operators themselves.

Using less or incorporating the cost of externalities into the price of oil (thus derivative products as well) is pretty unpopular though.

I know this is INCONVENIENT to the Anti-corporate, anti-petroleum, liberal crowd. But unless you live a life apart from petroleum based products, you're complicit in the oil spill, because without your demands for their product, BP would not be in the ocean drilling.

It is inconvenient that modern society, including of course myself, requires so much assistance from petroleum products. But I deal with that fact, rather than take your implicit stance of "therefore being anti-corporate and anti-petroleum is stupid and wrong". I try to use less petroleum products. I drive a fuel-efficient car, I recycle plastic, and try to simply not use plastic where not necessary (e.g. bottled water).

Yet because I live in modern society, and because I really, really like modern society and the things it brings -- for example, the ability for us to have this discussion -- I recognize that I am contributing to the problem. Being intelligent and responsible, this means I try to mitigate the problem as much as possible. Not wave my hands and say "well since I'm part of the problem, I can't legitimately claim to be part of the solution and ergo should not try". That's nonsense.

So until you're completely removed from the benefits of petroleum based products (including many plastics), you're at least partially responsible for the problem.

Indeed I am. And one of the ways I try to take responsibility for this fact is by voting for representatives who will regulate the oil companies to try to prevent this kind of ecological disaster, while pushing alternatives to oil for certain uses. The EPA et. al. are the mechanisms by which I try to have some agency in this situation. But many people, especially those financially invested, oppose these regulations vehemently. Some even argue that my stance is hypocritical because I argue against using massive amounts of oil yet use it myself, and therefore my position should be ignored and the status quo maintained.

Are you really arguing that we're equally culpable?

Of course, we can stop all off shore drilling completely and all drilling anywhere where we "care" about the "environment" but I think you'd be whining then about $100/gal gas prices and more of our money going to wacko religious nutjobs in the Middle East.

Actually, you won't find me whining. Prices won't reach that high overnight, and as they rise people, even those who don't give a rats ass about the environment and will use any argument to justify not caring, will suddenly find themselves with the same motivation to reduce their oil usage. Just like what happened when gas hit $5/gal and SUV sales plummeted.

We are switching off of oil eventually. The question is simply when, at what cost, under what terms (our own terms or fate's), and how many ecological disasters will occur as we try to delay the inevitable.

In the meantime, you're right -- I'm responsible, you're responsible. So let's join forces and actually take the reigns of responsibility and work to prevent this from happening again!

FWIW, land based oil spills tend to stay in approximately the same place. Ocean based oil spills tend to circulate around the globe. The scales of disaster aren't commensurate.... And also don't scale equally. E.g., at sea a small oil spill will be diluted so much that bacteria can degrade it to nothing before it's of any significance, but on land even relatively minor spills need to be attended to. But on land most of a large oil spill can be recovered at relatively minor cost, but in the ocean...ther

When did I ask that they cut corners?If I could go buy gas and get a guarantee that it did not come form BP I sure as hell would. I would love to send a market signal that I prefer producers who do not cut corners.

Well, that's easy. Go to a service station with a big sign that says, "Exxon".

BP had a 2009 profit of $26 billion on revenue of $246 billion. The Exxon Valdez oil spill cost exxon around $4 billion (for comparison, their profit for the year was around $5 billion). The gulf coast (and possibly the florida atlantic coast) is larger and more expensive but bankruptcy isn't an imminent danger (at least until the civil suits start kicking in).

Investigators delving into the possible cause of the massive gulf oil spill are focusing on the role of Houston-based Halliburton Co., the giant energy services company, which was responsible for cementing the drill into place below the water. The company acknowledged Friday that it had completed the final cementing of the oil well and pipe just 20 hours before the blowout last week.

<here be snippage>

Cementing a deep-water drilling operation is a process fraught with danger. A 2007 study by the U.S. Minerals Management Service found that cementing was the single most important factor in 18 of 39 well blowouts in the Gulf of Mexico over a 14-year period -- more than equipment malfunction. Halliburton has been accused of a poor cement job in the case of a major blowout in the Timor Sea off Australia last August. An investigation is underway.

According to experts cited in Friday's Wall St. Journal, the timing of last week's cement job in relation to the explosion -- only 20 hours beforehand, and the history of cement problems in other blowouts "point to it as a possible culprit." Robert MacKenzie, managing director of energy and natural resources at FBR Capital Markets and a former cementing engineer, told the Journal, "The initial likely cause of gas coming to the surface had something to do with the cement."from Gulf oil spill: The Halliburton connection [latimes.com]

So it does seem premature to lay this at the feet of British Petroleum. From what I've been reading, BP has done quite a bit of late to reduce their accident rates and otherwise improve their business model.

We worry about nuclear plants going Chernobyl, but how much do we worry about that chemical refinery 20 miles away? If it had an uncontrolled fire, it could spew toxic chemicals into the air that would be about as disastrous as fallout. It's like worrying about a plane crash when you drive like a maniac.

Yet we still need oil, so we'll keep pumping. Greeks protest and riot when they realize they are going to have to start paying for their entitlement programs, and we complain when we need to pay more for gas. Well, we can't have it both ways. If we want to live 25 miles from where we work, we're going to have to pay for it. If we don't pay for it at the pump, then we'll have to pay for it when a shared resource, like the ocean, is destroyed.

I'm still a supporter of offshore drilling. Ask me again in a year, when this whole episode has concluded (or not), and I may change my mind.

Agreed. And unfortunate how most anti-nuclear arguments use Chernobyl as an example - we can build them so much safer today. Looks like the oil drilling technology hasn't come as far, while still capable of producing devastating effects for years to come.

Chernobyl could have been built much more safely than Chernobyl (was built). But it cost less to build it as they did.

This particular oil rig could very likely have been built/operated more safely than it was. But who'll make BP do that?

Similarly, oil pipelines can be very safe, but they have been operated very unsafely, with maintenance neglected until accidents happen. It turns out that it's cheaper that way, lawsuits and all.

It's not a matter of what "we" can do. It's a matter of what government will actively regulate business to do. Business doesn't like regulation, and they often have more influence on lawmaking than "we" do. As long as no one pays much attention, they get their way.

BP was one of the oil companies that lobbied against legislation to make this sort of operation safer. To save millions then, they are going to pay billions now. And people on the Gulf Coast of course will be paying with polluted coast lines.

It's called Regulatory capture [wikipedia.org]. You don't have the time to study every effect of every regulation proposed by someone who was appointed by someone who was elected within a district where you can vote. But business-paid lobbyists do have that time. So you demand that something must be done, and when a new thousand pages of laws and regulations are created you're appeased, because what voter has time to hunt through those laws for corporate giveaways like $75 million liability limits [yahoo.com]?

Yeah, businesses hate regulation. "We'll write a bunch of lawyerese that acts as a barrier to entry for would-be new competitors, and we'll promise to bail you out at the expense of your victims if your risk-taking backfires - but watch out if it does backfire, because then the furious voters will demand that we do the same thing again!"

The leaseholder of the well has a legal responsibility to clean up any mess emanating from the well. Legally, it is BPs fuck up. Morally, it is their fuck up because they hired the company and were in a position to specify what safety measures should be taken. An argument like yours would mean that a large company basically never had to take responsibility for anything just by subcontracting stuff out.

It really seems like an understatement to call this a 'spill', as though it were a limited quantity from an oil freighter or something. It's an underwater gusher. I knew it was a huge disaster when it was reported as such with the addendum of at least 30 days to fix. At least. How would they even fix something like that? Has anything like this been attempted before?

It is very similar to the Ixtoc pemex 'spill' of 1980. It flowed for almost a year before they got it closed. It ruined the Texas coast for years, You couldn't even walk on the beach without taking a can of kerosene to wash the tar off your feet. That leak was at less than 200 feet. This one is at 5000.

I remember that leak-- as a child, every summer I used to go swimming off Padre Island (near Corpus Christi), and one time I came back from swimming with hot, sticky tar clumped all over my body. Put me off oceans for years.

Not on the seafloor I don't think. In Kuwait they used explosives, as I recall. That had its own special challenges as the Iraqis had lit the wells on fire, and the temperatures were tremendous. But it was still above water at normal atmospheric pressure for sea level. Doing any kind of complex operation 5,000 feet below the surface is damned tricky, and pretty much every plan has the disclaimer "We've never tried this before", which sort of translates into each plan being a trial balloon with no guarantee of any degree of success.

It's pretty much a worst case scenario, but BP, and I suspect a whole lot of politicians, went out of their way to minimize the potential. But even if it is unlikely, the law of averages pretty much guarantees that the longer you do something, even if it has a relatively low risk, will eventually lead to a major disaster.

I don't think anyone is quite sure why the explosion happened, but what's very clear is the fail safes failed. It may be a while before we know why, of course, but it does signal at least the possibility that insufficient precautions were put into play. It seems elementary to me that when you're designing such a drilling system, and realizing the vast pressure these oil deposits are under, that when operating in conditions that make fixing a gusher or blow out of some kind extremely difficult, you make damned good and sure your capping system is going to bloody well work.

I don't think Kathleen Blanco sponsored a bill that asked for a hurricane to hit Louisiana, while Jindal sponsored the Deep Ocean Energy Resources Act.
He asked for it.

The Deep Ocean Energy Resources Act is discussed here. [heritage.org] I like the following section on the safety of offshore drilling.

Myth: Drilling poses great risks of oil spills. The last major offshore oil spill in America occurred off of Santa Barbara in 1969. Critics of offshore drilling still refer to this incident, but much has changed in the interim. Drilling technology has greatly advanced in recent decades, and any new drilling will have to comply with strict safeguards that did not exist then.

According to the National Academy of Sciences, "[I]mproved production technology and safety training of personnel have dramatically reduced both blowouts and daily operational spills." Currently, only 1 percent of oil in North American waters came from offshore oil wells, far less than that attributable to natural seepage from the sea floor. Hurricane Katrina provided another reminder that fears of oil spills are overblown and anachronistic: Despite 170-mile-per-hour winds and massive waves striking many platforms, there was not a single significant offshore oil spill.

That said, it's good this happened in the Gulf, which is relatively contained. Good for the oceans as a whole, bad for the Gulf sea and shoreline ecosystems.

* * *

One of cool things folks forget about the movie Soylent Green: The green stuff is supposed to be made from krill. Edward G. Robinson's character goes to the euthenasia parlor after reading a Soylent Corporation research study taken from a murdered executive's home. The reason that the Soylent corporation is making the crackers from corpses is an ocean ecosystem collapse. I don't remember if they made the connection, but the movie also invokes the greenhouse effect. In 1973.

It's not really over-reacting, things ARE pretty bad. I'm no marine biologist, but the last time I checked, most creatures have some variable level of tolerance when it comes to acidification and warming. That being said, we've still managed to kill a lot of creatures by affecting those changes. Ecosystems still have trouble recovering after a regular oil tanker spill.

And I am not aware of any creature that was able to survive an oil spill without human aid. Now, normally aiding creatures is in the process of cleaning it up, but we haven't even hit that part yet, its still uncontained.

How many creatures would normally migrate through the gulf but won't be able to this year? This is going to unbalance a lot more than just the gulf.

That said, it's good this happened in the Gulf, which is relatively contained. Good for the oceans as a whole, bad for the Gulf sea and shoreline ecosystems.

That's providing it stays contained. There seems to be a growing consensus that the Gulf Stream may pick some of this up, so anyone sitting on the Atlantic coast whistling with relief may not be happy in a few days.

There are two ways of looking at what to do -- proximate and ultimate.

In the proximate sense, one thing to do is volunteer time or supplies if you're in an affected area. I'm in Florida -- in my area, I know right now of Suncoast Seabird Sanctuary ( http://www.seabirdsanctuary.com/uploads/oil.pdf [seabirdsanctuary.com] ) and Audubon Florida ( http://audubonoffloridanews.org/ [audubonoffloridanews.org] ), which are each asking for volunteers, money, and/or supplies. Other organizations may be looking for help -- help if you can, spread the word even if you can't.

In the ultimate sense, it's hard not to become reactionary to things like this. Clearly there's a need for some serious prevention, and however that comes about, it must. There are boycotts, letter writing campaigns, and the like, and while they may seem awfully pedestrian, the first step in each is something that's been needed for an exquisitely long time -- awareness. People don't tend to realize that the oceans are just downstream from everyone -- for example, just how many people do you think recognize the oil spill that dribbles into the Gulf every year from runoff into the Mississippi watershed? It's once people start to realize what's happening, what's important, and where changes need to happen that movement toward change occurs. Oil being the trigger word that it is these days, it's hard to say whether or not ocean health is foremost in people's minds. Building awareness -- even inland! -- is about getting it there.

I don't know what the key is. Maybe it's kids asking whether the animals they love seeing at the aquarium are going to be lost because of the oil spill. Maybe it's fishermen who lose their livelihoods because their fisheries are either contaminated or outright destroyed. Maybe it's people who worked in tourism and sports industries that previously thrived on healthy beaches and coastal waters. Whatever that key is, some catalysis needs to happen soon, and it needs to start with people simply caring enough to understand and do something, wherever they are, however they can. Too much is at stake.

Do people really think offshore drilling should be stopped because of this?

Transitions should be made to other forms of power, but my Lord, what else is there to substitute for oil for transportation in the short-mid term? Nothing. We need to get more oil. The WSJ reported that the Department of the Interior knew about failings of shear rams in deepwater conditions (the mechanism that should have shut this well down) since 2004 but didn't do anything about it.

Thanks, Uncle Sam. BP holds blame, the US government holds blame, and Transocean holds blame. But we should increase safety mechanism reliability and oversight without going Greenpeace on this.

Note of credibility: I love LA and am from the Gulf Coast. I grasp what this can do to the local economy and my oyster appetite. I can see rigs from 1/4 mile from my old back yard. Without proper safeguards, this shit happens. But it's unavoidable that we drill. Let's manage risk better.

Thing I don't get is why every car today is still running on oil based fuels.

30 years ago, the LA times truck that pulled up each week to offload the "Calendar" sections we put in the Sunday papers. On the back, it had a sign which said "this truck is running on clean natural gas". I thought, "cool, no more smog!" If they are already using on LA times trucks, it can't too long before some cars have it too. No more Arab oil embargoes, etc.

In about 2004 or 2005, the Washington area metro converted its entire fleet of buses to natural gas in about a year. I work near a major Metro station and could see the first few buses and was excited. Within a year, it was rare to see an old diesel bus. No more smelly diesel fumes!. If an agency as incompetent as Washington Metro can convert its entire bus fleet in a year, how hard can it be?

We have been able to do this easily for at least 30 years. Apparently to convert a regular gas engine to natural gas requires only a few modifications, to the gas tank (obviousely), fuel lines and injectors. As anyone who has been to a Home Depot or most grocery stores knows, the distribution system is also already in place.

Imagine the marketplace if we had 3 different fuel systems for transporation: Oil, Natural Gas, and Electricity. Then as a bad computer analogy, imagine if Windows, Linux, and OS/X each had about a 33% market share.

An NPR interview this morning with a BP executive asked two simple questions:1. Are you responsible for the leak?2. Will you pay for the results of the leak?

The response was along the lines of "We will cooperate with cleanup and containment efforts, and will pay any legitimate claims."I think this will be a long (decades?), dirty fight to hold BP accountable.

The liability fight will probably not be quite what most expect. By statute, a rig owner's out-of-pocket liability for a spill is capped at around $75 million. In exchange, they pay a tax of about $0.08/barrel into a common fund which will be used to pay for claims beyond the cap. At the moment, the fund stands at about $1.6 billion. (Though the per incident payout from this fund is capped at $1 billion.)

The benefit of this system is, of course, that oil companies aren't exposed to devastating liability; instead, the liability is spread across he entire oil industry. This is also the problem: no individual oil company has an adequate economic incentive to avoid risky behavior.

We all die, of course. It's the end of the world. This is utterly catastrophic and utterly unprecedented. No such thing could ever happen naturally, At no time in the entire history of the planet has erosion or tectonic activity ever ruptured a large oil reservoir. There are no bacteria that metabolize oil and it does not oxidize or decay naturally in any way, and it kills everything it touches. It will float on the surface of the ocean forever, bringing an end to all life.

there is truth in your sarcasm, the earth will be just fine. It has endured worse. It has it's own systems to correct ecological imbalances, even ones like this.
The problem is, for the earth, a few thousand years is considered instant healing.

So no it's not the end of the world. But on our time scale, it could still be a disaster of unprecedented proportions that we will have to deal with through our lifetimes.

The Gulf of Mexico is huge compared to a sailboat, but tiny compared to the whole ocean. The volume of the ocean is 1.5 x 10^18 tons. Even if a ton of oil contaminates a million tons of water, 50,000 barrels a day would take over half a million years to do the job by my calculations.

It may be a decent sized oil reservoir (it is far from "one of the largest ever" per the article) but it isn't THAT big. Sometime in the next half million years it will stop gushing on its own. Probably before that.

This is a very serious event on the scale of the Gulf, but it is nowhere near as serious as ocean acidification from atmospheric CO2, which affects the entire ocean.

You seem to be thinking that the ocean needs to be saturated with oil for it to have an effect. Most of the ocean is already dead, always has been. The whole eco-system depends on a few rich spots to feed it. Why do you think so many sea live hold such epic migrations? Because they like it?

How can a tiny bit of metal possibly kill a human being? Fine, let me stick a needle in your brain, see how long you last. Maybe a long time, maybe not long at all.

Killing the eco-system doesn't have to be whole-sale slaughter. All you have to do is knock over one part of the food-chain. It doens't even have to mean the end of life in the ocean. The wrong algea start to grow out of control, and you have plenty of life, and also death at the same time.

Will this be it? Well we better just bloody hope it isn't because else we are screwed. But the right wingers seem determined to keep trying to screw up until they finally really manage to screw us all.

Yes, that much oil is enough to cause the extinction of humanity, if it finds its way into our bloodstreams.

Ocean currents are, fortunately, not that selective.

This botched well is shaping up to be a terrible mess but it will, if anything, destroy America's best beaches, and its most valuable wetlands. It won't destroy the ocean. I am just advocating for directing your concerns in the right direction, not for shrugging them off.

You seem to think that the environment can't cope with oil. Natural oil seepage [sciencedaily.com] in the Gulf of Mexico [sciencedaily.com] amounts to about 500,000 barrels/yr. (You didn't think those oil fields we're tapping were static, did you? They leak oil by themselves all the time.)

The big difference in this case is that the oil is concentrated to the point where it can gum up birds' feathers and kill off shellfish. With natural seeps, the oil is spread out where microbes can break it down before it adversely affects larger life forms. Over time the same microbes will deal with this spill. A lot of damage will happen before then, but they will deal with it. It happened before in 1979 [wikipedia.org] (estimated 10k-30k barrels/day for 10 months) and it didn't kill off the ecosystem in the Gulf then. This one won't kill off the ecosystem in the Gulf either. It will be bad for a time, but it's not the end of the Gulf as you seem to think it will be.

If it takes 1:1,000,000 oil to water to destroy the ecosystem, it doesn't take that concentration everywhere at once. Once the oil has destroyed an area, it can drift somewhere else to wreak havoc. It will take years (dozens? hundreds?) for any one area to recover, and that time span will only increase the larger the area that gets destroyed. Life can recover fairly readily if neighboring populations can move in quickly, but if those neighboring populations were also killed, who knows what it will take to recover.

That said, of course we still won't see all the oceans get destroyed, but worst-case the ecosystem of the gulf may be decimated for the rest of our lives and then some.

The thing that's been on my mind a lot over the last couple of days is that I've heard numerous accusations over the years that the whole Gulf offshore industry is a health and safety nightmare compared to European (notably North Sea) operations... While we don't know the cause of the explosion yet (and, obviously, North Sea rigs have had explosive accidents) does anyone have any real commentary about Euro vs NA safety, and/or the likelihood of an equivalent type of accident in Europe?

With more than 150 replies so far, only one poster mentions the Transocean drilling contractor.

Drilling contractors drill wells for oil companies like a house building contractor will build your house.

Mass media almost exclusively talk about BP but the drilling contractor is the real specialist is oil well drilling. So, it is just like the media were mentioning exclusively yourself because the house you had a contractor building blew up and killed people.

Of course the client (BP) might very well have some part of responsibility, especially if they pressured the contractor to cut costs in a way impacting security. I wander how this thing will settle in courts, how the responsibilities will be split.

Anyway, I though that it was good to mention the above in contrast to the over simplistic view usually depicted in mass media.

I was in the US Navy for nine years, five of those at sea. And while you are on a ship, you train for fire-fighting several times a week, with dozens of different scenarios. And in ALL of them, de-watering is one of the most crucial aspects of fire-fighting.

If you don't take out the water you're pumping into the space that's on fire, your ship will sink. So we train, train and train some more on how to use electric pumps, diesel pumps, installed pumps, peri-jet eductors [derbyshiremachine.com], s-type eductors [wikipedia.org] and just plain mops and buckets.

I've been maintaining that this rig should NOT have gone down. They should have got fire-fighters onboard to establish fire boundaries, and more importantly, flooding boundaries. Bulkheads should have been sealed off, pumps should have been installed and fire-fighting water should have been pumped out.

But Mother of God...looking at those pictures, I don't think anything would have saved it.

The fire appears to involve the entire center of the rig. I was thinking, get someone inside the pontoons to keep them pumped out, but there doesn't look like there was any way to get someone inside them.

Based on what I could see in the pictures, my guess is that the overall superstructure simply melted. The tops of the pontoons probably burned through, losing watertight integrity. Fire would have poured inside, killing any pumps that might have been running, and then the fire-fighting water simply filled them up.

It's not clear that an acoustic data link to the blowout protector would have helped. The model installed was supposed to close if the connection to the surface was lost. If it didn't close on that, a secondary data link probably wouldn't help.

As for things that go wrong, here's a marlin with its spear caught in a blowout preventer. [youtube.com] An underwater ROV with robot arms is brought into position, grabs onto the tail of the marlin,
pulls it out, and releases the tail. The marlin then charges forward, and jams itself into the same place. The ROV moves back into position, grabs the dumb fish, pulls it out again, and drags it a short distance away before releasing it. The fish again tries to attack the blowout preventer, but finally gives up.

Then why are you posting anonymously?
When Nixon signed all the current environmental laws in the 1970s, it was because pollution was so bad that it could not be denied as a figment of liberal media. And here comes another such event. Welcome to your worst nightmare. And mine.

I think the supporters of offshore drilling, at least the intelligent ones, and I am not saying the "Drill Baby Drill" crowd was knew there would be serious accident eventually. Its just a common sense no matter what precautions you take if you engage in a fundamentally dangerous activity often enough eventually the odds will catch up with. Skiers break bones, drivers have accidents, nuclear reactors melt down or leak, coal mines collapse, drillers have spills, these things happen.

We should do our best to learn what went wrong and our best to avoid it in the future but we must accept that this is a consequence of the life style we enjoy the rest of the time. Experience with other major spills shows us the environment will recover eventually. This is a tragedy and its going to impact some of us more than others. I bet though for every Gulf Coast fisherman or tour operator that gets put out of business there was AT LEAST one who was/is making a comfortable living in oil and gas. I think you also have to consider all the good in terms of quality of life cheap petroleum and energy in general has done our nation as whole and will no doubt continue to do. When you look at this in broad objective terms its hard for me to conclude it was not worth it. Maybe when all the consequences are known I will change my mind but for now lets be sensible and keep in mind the old saying "no pain no gain."

I think the supporters of offshore drilling, at least the intelligent ones, and I am not saying the "Drill Baby Drill" crowd was knew there would be serious accident eventually. Its just a common sense no matter what precautions you take if you engage in a fundamentally dangerous activity often enough eventually the odds will catch up with. Skiers break bones, drivers have accidents, nuclear reactors melt down or leak, coal mines collapse, drillers have spills, these things happen.

We should do our best to learn what went wrong and our best to avoid it in the future but we must accept that this is a consequence of the life style we enjoy the rest of the time. Experience with other major spills shows us the environment will recover eventually. This is a tragedy and its going to impact some of us more than others. I bet though for every Gulf Coast fisherman or tour operator that gets put out of business there was AT LEAST one who was/is making a comfortable living in oil and gas. I think you also have to consider all the good in terms of quality of life cheap petroleum and energy in general has done our nation as whole and will no doubt continue to do. When you look at this in broad objective terms its hard for me to conclude it was not worth it. Maybe when all the consequences are known I will change my mind but for now lets be sensible and keep in mind the old saying "no pain no gain."

There is something wrong with a lot of people that prevents them from accepting that we are mortal beings and the world, in many ways, is a dangerous place. It's like they want to live a modern lifestyle directly or indirectly involving such things as cars, other heavy machinery, electricity, oil, prepared foods, medicine, aviation and lots of other things but do not want to acknowledge the non-zero risk associated with them. Unfortunate events like this oil spill are considered newsworthy because they ar

One of the problems is that the US and Britain do not have as strong requirements as other countries for deep water drilling. For example, several other countries require an acoustically activated remote shut-off valve.

Halliburton is under investigation for problems cementing near Australia and they had just done this to this rig. About half of the blowouts that have occurred in the gulf were due to cementing problems. There's also concern that curing cement raised the temperature of methane hydrates causing it to become unstable.

We should do our best to learn what went wrong and our best to avoid it in the future but we must accept that this is a consequence of the life style we enjoy the rest of the time.

We could also take it as a sign that our way of living needs to change. We need to use less energy and switch to less damaging, more sustainable energy sources. People hate to acknowledge it, but it's the simple truth.

Just writing this sort of accident off as "the cost of doing business" only works in the short term. Eventually, the cheap, accessible oil will be gone, the ecological damage will be irreversible, and then we'll still have to switch over to other energy sources. It's clear that we're heading down a blind alley, so why not turn around ASAP, rather than waiting until all possible damage has been done?

It is sad that the US has swung so far to the right, with such extreme abuses of power that Nixon now comes across as a relatively honest moderate.

It's swung so far in the direction of statism that "left" and "right" have become devoid of any real meaning. Both used to mean a set of political principles. Now they're just two different approaches to the same goal of expanding government. What is now called "right" wants to expand government for the purposes of defense and national security. What is now called "left" wants to expand government for the purposes of social engineering and entitlements. The result is the same and the two ideologies are little more than excuses or justifications.

The two-party system has done to politics what a reasonable person would expect a duopoly to do to a market. The former fails to serve the interests of the voter just like the latter fails to serve the interests of the customer. In both scenarios the voter and the customer are viewed as a means of maintaining power.

It seems that, if anything, it's swung away from statism. In the post-WW2 but pre-Reagan era, both parties were in favor of a whole range of statist approaches that now often struggle to get support among even the nominally "left" party. For example, Nixon imposed price controls, created the EPA, and was in favor of a national healthcare program, and was seen as right-wing at the time.

Yeah, it's gone up, but most of that has been due to autopilots put in place decades ago (mostly social security and medicare expanding faster than inflation). I don't see much actual support for new policies among politicians.

What do you call the government-sponsored bailouts of various financial companies, or government expanding into the health-care insurance market? Or a few years prior to that, the federalization of airport security into the TSA, or the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, or the Patriot Act? If these are not (relatively) new policies I don't know what would qualify.

The huge mistake you make is in assuming that all forms of calamity can be warded off with proper planning. It's true that there's a heck of a lot that can be avoided with foresight and preparation. But a well-placed hurricane, bullet, love affair, or metastatic tumor can annihilate every one of those plans.

I suspect you're the kind of personality that thrives on feeling like you're in control and have the moral high ground. And that's all very well and good up to a point, but:

No matter how carefully you plan, it can all go to shit in an instant. And there's nothing you can do about it. EVER.

So if your worldview depends on cognitive errors like the just-world fallacy [wikipedia.org], or blaming the victim [wikipedia.org]...well, then you're almost guaranteed to spend your last days in a state of abject terror and despair. Good luck with that.

You're absolutely right. I'm Irish and to me, the Democrats are, at best, moderate and at worst, on the hard right compared to my left wing politics. In fact, the former American Ambassador to Ireland, Tom Foley, once called me "an out and out Marxist". Now I'm no Marxist, hell, I'm not even communist, but considering his politics and the huge swing to the right that Americans have had since Reagan, I took it as being that I was simply one of the few true left wingers that he had encountered in those early days of his tenure in Ireland!

He's a corporatist. If you think he is left wing, you really have guzzled the Flavor-Aid.

Both Left and Right are corporatist. They are merely two different brands of corporatism that use different approaches to achieve the same goal of statism. Pick the most "conservative" political candidate and pick the most "liberal" political candidate. Then do some research and look at their list of sponsors. See all the names they have in common? Why, it's almost as though the people who bankroll campaigns don't care who wins...

The bickering about Left vs. Right is designed to distract attention away from what is actually happening. I wish I could recall and attribute the eloquent quote about our politics becoming more polar as our political parties become more homogeneous, for it's an accurate one. The distraction is all about divide and conquer. Like "bread and circus" or "thesis, antithesis, synthesis" it's an age-old tactic used by rulers and governments throughout history for the simple reason that it's effective. Here's why it works: the more time we waste blaming "the other party" for society's ills the less time we spend demanding more freedom in the form of minimal government.

They will be forced to pay the legal max of $75 million then there is a special $1-2billion fund for oil spill clean up that is part of the gas tax we all pay. As for safety they had a blow out protector/shut off but it's was either damaged or defective as it failed to activate. Right now there not much they can do to contain the spill on the surface because of bad weather. They are doing all they can to get the shut off activated with ROVs but they can only do so much given how complicated it is to do anything 5,000' below of the surface in bad weather. Sadly the vast majority of people are naive idiots who want BP and the Feds to snap there fingers and make it all better instantly. This is a very complicated and complex operation in deep water then again this is/. which is full of "elites" who know they can do it better and fully grasp all the problems and would have no problem getting it done instantly.

1 And the fifth angel blew his trumpet, and I saw a star fallen from heaven to earth, and he was given the key of the shaft of the bottomless pit; 2 he opened the shaft of the bottomless pit, and from the shaft rose smoke like the smoke of a great furnace, and the sun and the air were darkened with the smoke from the shaft.

1 And the fifth angel blew his trumpet, and I saw a star fallen from heaven to earth, and he was given the key of the shaft of the bottomless pit; 2 he opened the shaft of the bottomless pit, and from the shaft rose smoke like the smoke of a great furnace, and the sun and the air were darkened with the smoke from the shaft.

Personally I was reminded of the dwarves digging too deep and unleashing a Balrog upon Middle Earth. Have we learned nothing from Tolkien?

Generally that channeling mechanism is a pipe of some sort, you can't just hope that the oil will float predictably upwards to a set location through a mile thick medium of salt water that has its own currents.

Considering the weather conditions that have largely persisted since the explosion, what exact good would putting out booms earlier done? Other than, of course, BP and the politicians briefly looking a little better (and by that I mean very briefly). I'd prefer responses that actually do something to responses which seem more designed as photo-ops for BP's CEO and the President.

Oh come on. Wind has been driving the slick over the booms. It isn't just where it appears on the surface that counts, it's the actual effectiveness of the booms, and that's pretty much determined by weather conditions.

The harsh reality is that there probably was no way to mitigate an event like this. You have at least 5,000 barrels a day barfing out of an uncontrolled well 5000 feet under the water, with intervening currents carrying it all over the place even before it reaches the surface, and then bad weather pushing it even further. The reality is that technologies like booms and dispersant chemicals may be reasonably effective for relatively small spills, but an ongoing high pressure river of oil puking out from the Gulf seafloor is not an event you can control.

The only real solution is going to be to find a way to divert or cap the well itself. Everything else, including washing the seabirds off, is just 6 o'clock news fodder. The fact is that once that platform exploded and burned uncontrolled, any hope of mitigating this disaster in the short term went out the window. I know you want to imagine some set of circumstances after the explosion that wouldn't have lead to a vast slick growing bigger and bigger, but this is simply too big for any containment measures invented thus far. Ultimately the well will have to be capped, as much shoreline as possible will be cleaned off, and the oil will ultimately end up in the sediments like the most of the Exxon Valdez oil did. We're basically going to have to let nature do its thing, and eat the damage to certain industries that is going to incur over the next few years.

If BP raises their prices, it opens the door for their competitors to under cut them.

The price of oil will be set by the supply and demand of the other producers if BP raises it's price. The the other producers can't meet demand, the price will rise to BP's costs. If the can, then BP will be losing sales and income to them.

The price of oil will be set by the supply and demand of the other producers if BP raises it's price.

...as we all learned in Econ 101. For those who went on to Econ 102, things are not so simple. There, they tought us about oligopoly, where markets are dominated by a small number of large players who can collude with each other to achieve results different than a perfectly competitive commodity market would achieve.

Most likely, prices will rise whether or not supplies are pinched. Why? Because every oil company knows that this crisis is a "cue" to restrict supplies in concert, and the public will accept the crisis as the obvious cause of increased prices.

Ever heard of OPEC? It's a legalized cartel controlling the prices.... more likely to oil company favor than anyone elses.

Time to do some reading up: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OPEC [wikipedia.org]"According to its statutes, one of the principal goals is the determination of the best means for safeguarding the cartel's interests, individually and collectively. It also pursues ways and means of ensuring the stabilization of prices in international oil markets with a view to eliminating harmful and unnecessary fluctuations; giving due regard at all times to the interests of the producing nations and to the necessity of securing a steady income to the producing countries; an efficient and regular supply of petroleum to consuming nations, and a fair return on their capital to those investing in the petroleum industry.[4]"

An individual tanker isn't all that large, at least in WW2. There is a reason we call modern tankers: super-tankers.

It is like people who think CO2 emissions don't matter because volcanoes do it as well. Indeed they do, but have these people never heard of adding up. This spil comes on top of all the others. On top of the coral reefs already dying, on top of fish stocks already being over fished, on top of the plastic we have been dumping whole sale in to the ocean.

Will this be the straw that killed the camels back? Hard to say, but if fishing is hurt then that means some areas need to pay more for their food then they do now and not everyone can afford that. Plus the replacement food will have to be grown somewhere else.

And down the line, some fish migrate and others are dependent on long food chains. I don't know what grows in place X that is eaten in place Y that has an effect on populations in Z.

This isn't about one tanker sinking with the oil inside. It is about tanker after tanker being emptied in one single spot with no way to end it so far except waiting for one of the biggest oil fields to run out. And that could be REALLY bad because according to the people who want to drill everywhere, oil doesn't run out.

The apocalypse won't come in a flash of thunder, it will the eco-system slowly dying from being over-stressed. Less 2012, more YKK or Testament.

An individual tanker isn't all that large, at least in WW2. There is a reason we call modern tankers: super-tankers.

Typical tanker capacity in WW2 was about 140,000 barrels per tanker.

This particular problem has been dumping oil out at a rate of about 5000 (not 50,000) barrels per day (so far).

So, sinking one loaded oil tanker dumped about as much oil into the ocean as this is expected to dump per month.

148 oil tankers were sunk during WW2. There was no ecological collapse as a result.

You do the math....

Note, for reference, that one barrel of oil is about 0.16 m^3. This particular incident (not sure whether explosion was cause or effect, and if cause, what cause of explosion was) translates to about 800 m^3 per day into the oceans. Or an oil slick 0.8 mm (yes, millimeter) thick over 1 square km of ocean per day.

If this goes on at this rate for two years, we're talking about a circle about 30km across having 0.8 mm (yes, millimeter) thick oil slick on it.

In other words, while this pretty much sucks for the Gulf Coast (where I live), the chances of this causing a worldwide collapse of ocean ecosystems is about ZERO.